I've always used KDE but yesterday before going to work i typed #emerge gnome and im using it now. let me tell you .. it's WAY faster than KDE in everything.. everything i click just pops up right away, and im only using PII 300.

but of course, it's not as eye candy as KDE. is there away to fix this.. some cool themes? window managers? what else? (i like KDE .NET theme)

p.s. how do i remove the panel menu on the top of the desktop (mac style) and make everything in the bottom menu?

i've been experiencing with themes and found thinice is almost what i want... but i noticed that no matter what theme i choose it only changes the colors and not the look of the buttons bars etc.. how do i change that to get flat buttons, something like the ones used in Gaim.

"emerge gtk-engines" will do what you want.
I do not use Gnome (only Sawfish + GTK-apps) therefore I do not know how to switch the engine. But you can do it manually by setting the path to your engine in ~/.gtkrc.
Example: .gtkrc: include "/usr/share/themes/Raleigh/gtk/gtkrc"

There are several gtk theme switcher apps or scripts on Freshmeat that make changing themes pretty easy.

But yeah, drop KDE and GNOME, use just a basic window manager like Sawfish or Fluxbox and the apps you want and the speed is just untouchable.

yeah... but i don't like win 3.x behavior i.e. i don't like my windows to minimize into icons somewhere on my desktop and to maximize them i have to look for the icons hidden behind my other windows and click on them because there is no taskbar.

I've been using different WMs for a while now. None seem to work as well as Gnome (I don't use KDE). In particular, windows open so the title bar is off screen (primarily with Galeon), they don't remember where they were and generally seem a little rough. I've tried fluxbox, windowmaker, xfce, enlightenment, flvm and maybe 1 or 2 more.

windowmaker seems to have the most promise.
xfce seems too much like CDE and errors about not being able to save files or something.
enlightenment locks up every time i try to change themes.
flcm or something like it won't start (not that I put much effort into getting it to)

All in all none are awful. My main gripe is ease of configuration. I'm going to give fluxbox another workout. Any tools that help with configuration? I edited wmaker's menu manually and that was a PITA .

Since I'm using older hardware, I'd say speed is fine even with Gnome. I was mainly trying to find a lighter weight WM, but I really don't want to sacrifice reasonable configuration. Does gnomecc work with just Gnome, or will it configure other WMs?

I don't know, Nautilus in Gnome is snazzy and all, but slow as hell. But then again, you don't have to use Nautilus.

btw, does anyone know if anyone took over development of Nautilus?

I'll probably just stick with Gnome... the others just seem unfinished.
As for Nautilus, it is on my "To Do" list for things to remove . I find it irritatiing.
Want to remove the MS Windows-like Icons (Start here, home and trash) from the desktop too.

yeah... but i don't like win 3.x behavior i.e. i don't like my windows to minimize into icons somewhere on my desktop and to maximize them i have to look for the icons hidden behind my other windows and click on them because there is no taskbar.

i think KDE and Gnome are popular for a reason.

I never really used win 3.11 or whatever, so I don't know that part. But having a couple desktops and learning or setting shortcuts for moving from desktop to desktop and/or running through windows beats any taskbar. Hands almost never leave the keyboard. Beautiful. I ended up replacing explorer.exe on my work computer because it seems so inelegent.

When I minimize a window in Sawfish, the things gone, no icon, until I either click on the root and bring it back or just hit my key combo. Really, you were asking for speed. And KDE and GNOME as environments are popular 'cause a lot of Windows people want a similiar desktop. I have no problem with that. The first distribution of Linux I used didn't even come with XFree, so I suppose I'm a little keyboard biased.